\"Beautiful" is the story of Mona Hibbard (Minnie Driver), a woman from Naperville, Ill., obsessed with winning the fictional Miss American Miss pageant despite the threat of being disqualified for having a child (Hallie Kate Eisenberg). "Beautiful" is also actress Sally Field's first time out as director, and it's more than a little depressing that the woman who uttered the now-famous phrase "You like me -- you really like me!" should, at age 54, still be mucking about with the tiresome women's themes of acceptance and self-esteem. That she goes about doing so with a script about beauty pageants makes her work here that much more dubious.
Beatutiful - PG-13
Starring:
Minnie Driver, Joey Lauren Adams, Hallie Kate Eisenberg
Directed by:
Sally Field
Now playing:
Showplace East 12
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This glorified Lifetime movie masquerading as a meditation on friendship, motherhood and being a woman in the dawn of the 21st century was written -- surprise! -- by a man. And not just any man: it was penned by Jon Bernstein, the Poet Laureat behind the Jerry Springer movie, "Ringmaster." We're supposed to learn a lesson about contemporary feminism from that guy?
Near the end of the movie, a presumably single mother chaperoning a young girls' slumber party sobs, "She's making a statement about the difficulties women face with self-esteem living in a patriarchal society" while watching Mona take a stand during the television broadcast of the pageant. A line like that rings patently false after witnessing the conniving, insincere and generally unpleasant antics of the pageant contestants. By that point in the film, viewers are more likely to feel altruism is a sham and beauty really is only skin deep, instead of feeling it's possible for women to triumph against our culture's still extant tools of gender oppression.
Joey Lauren Adams ("Chasing Amy") is positively wasted as Mona's self-sacrificing best friend, Ruby, mostly due to a radically underdeveloped subplot that lands her in jail. What's worse, the most affecting moments in the film don't involve her, the usually sublime Driver or even precocious Eisenberg. The blossoming friendship between Mona and Ruby as 13-year-old girls is played out in the first 30 minutes of the movie with more sensitivity and pathos than this socially hegemonic film deserves.
